Songbirds - Christy Lefteri

 If you were in any way worried that Christy Lefteri would be unable match The Beekeeper of Aleppo then relax! Songbirds is as good if not better. Like Beekeeper it will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading.

It’s a beautifully constructed novel and the prose flows with elegance and fluidity. In common with Beekeeper this is a tale of people, not refugees in this case, but migrant workers forced to leave their own environments in order to earn enough money to live and support their loved ones. And you get a sense from the novel of just how desperate people become before they take this drastic step. It’s a story also that powerfully illustrates how class and race can dramatically impact outcomes. But it’s a story, too, of love and loss and how an individual may deal with those states. 

‘When there is love, there is safe place for sadness.’

 The story is told from the perspectives of Petra, a widowed optician raising her child and Yiannis, a forager by day and a poacher of songbirds by night. The story unfolds through their narratives and we learn of their lives and that of Nisha, a domestic worker from Sri Lanka. Petra has employed Nisha for the past nine years. Nisha is in a relationship with Yiannis. The thrust of the story pivots on Nisha’s unexplained disappearance.

Petra and Yiannis are poles apart socially but their solidarity towards the common goal of finding out what has happened to Nisha enables them to contemplate themselves and their own lives, a journey of discovery. Their mission also highlights how little Petra really knows of Nisha and the unfolding of that realisation and comprehension is poignant. Important, too, is Petra’s daughter, Aliki, and another commanding part of the story is how the dynamic of their mother/daughter relationship is affected by Nisha’s disappearance. But Nisha has a daughter too, and she is the reason Nisha came to Cyprus in the first place - to earn money for her child’s education.

It’s a slow paced story which demonstrates the agonising frustration and hindrance of prejudice and bureaucracy. There’s an understated simplicity to the writing that belies the complexity of situations and emotions described. Yet there remains a certain sense of hope at the end of the story.

I saw the songbirds as symbolic of the fragility and potential dangers of migration. As characters in the book their plights and fates were heartbreaking and upsetting but as a literary device they impress as a potent metaphor. 

My thanks to Readers First for my gifted copy.